The public's commitment is never a reflection afterwards for the Indian artist Jitish Kallat, who often plays with participative and public art in his work. In its 2007 installation “Public notice 2“The shelves contain 4,479 resin letters imitating bones which stated the speech of Mohandas Gandhi in 1930 pronounced before the 240 miles historic Dandi MarchInviting visitors to revisit these words almost a century later.
Kallat's most recent project, Annegiousinitially took the form of a participatory installation to the presentation of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) to India Art Fair 2024 in Delhi earlier this year. Kallat’s objective was to actively engage the public in the life of the South African leader Nelson Mandela, whose legacy of anti-apartheid activism connects to the struggles in progress for India and South Asia largely. The scans of the Mandela office calendar entrances from 1976 to 1989 were dynamically projected on the walls and the floor of a dark room, immersing visitors in its daily routines, its interactions and even blood pressure logs during its decades of incarceration in South Africa. Keeping meticulous recordings is only many habits that Mandela has practiced in her cell, in particular by writing letters and an autobiography, by studying, reading and establishing links with other anti-apartheid activists incarcerated alongside him. The picturesque hills, greenery, flora, meadows and beaches such as photographed in office calendars, which were produced by the National Department of Tourism, are all accompanied by the expression “it is sunny today in South Africa”.
Conservator Sukanya Baskar designed a book published in September by FICA who preserves Annegious in a physical formatBringing together images of the installation, an essay by the art historian Beth Lemon, and a transcription of a conversation between Kallat and the professional of law Albie Sachs, which Mandela appointed judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa in 1994. In their conversation, Kallat and Sachs discuss the importance of calendar imagery apparently routine for the study of apartheid.
Baskar said Hyperalgic that for her, the Drafting The police were crucial to develop the concepts of social definitions in relation to the legal definitions of justice. It was developed in 2019 By the visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar and the Memoirs, poet and lawyer REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS to highlight the means to write and to erase contradictory accounts, which is particularly appropriate while the book combines the conversation between Kallat and Sachs with scans of the Mandela office calendar in his own writing.
Hard, Annemay We welcome with an overwhelming darkness on its cover and in its pages, recalling the multiple prison cells that Mandela would have lived. The book linked to the spiral is designed to present itself as any typical office calendar, and you can turn around on any page to meet Annegious through Kallat's eyes.
An entry of August 1989 read as “visited by Mamphela Ramphele for 3 hours” Steve Biko. Above the grid is a photo saturated with a wide open expanse in the Namaqualand region, a lush captured in the spring.
Another week from April 1976, just a few months before Soweto uprising Directed by black South African students in response to legislation requiring the use of Afrikaans and English by teachers, only supports two scribbled notes. The image above, a work of art of the South African Blanche painter JH Pierneef, captures the robust beauty of the Great Escarpment Rock Formation whose appearance here seems decidedly sinister.
Mandela also recorded its blood pressure sporadically alongside the records of its activities, with a few months crowded with notes and others are left mainly empty. Certain bleeding of installation photos are trying to keep its scale without eclipizing on the act of maintaining an office calendar, a deceptively banal ritual whose intimacy grants us a new understanding of Mandela's inner life and objects of daily archive that speak of the societal structures of violence and injustice.
